The episode shows how even the most diligent companies can run into problems as they farm out production. The decision by Mattel Inc.'s Fisher-Price unit to recall nearly a million playthings this week because of possible lead paint contamination is the latest safety concern raised about manufacturing in China.

A group of U.S. senators led by Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) sent a letter Thursday to Nancy Nord, chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, asking her to assess, within seven days, whether the United States should detain and inspect all children's products from China that contain paint.

"American families should not be playing Chinese Roulette at the toy store," Durbin said in a statement.

Mattel said it was working to understand how the problem happened at a subcontractor's plant and what the company could do to prevent similar issues in the future.

"I'm disappointed and I'm upset this happened and I apologize. ... The trust of our consumers is deeply important to Mattel and to me," Mattel Chief Executive Robert Eckert said in an interview Thursday. "In the long term I think we won't be judged by the fact that a mistake was made in a vendor's plant, but instead we'll be judged on how we respond."

Edmund Mierzwinski, national consumer program director for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said U.S. firms needed to take greater responsibility for products they import. "If they choose not to use U.S. companies to make homegrown products, that's the bed they've chosen to lay in," he said.

Lead paint, which has been banned in the United States for 30 years, is considered particularly dangerous for children, whose brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to the effects of lead.

Mattel, which also makes Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars, said it was able to stop two-thirds of the 967,000 toys recalled in the United States before they hit store shelves.

But that left about 300,000 Fisher-Price toys, including a Sesame Street shape sorter and a backpack based on popular Nickelodeon shows Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go, in the market. Mattel said it did not know how many consumers bought those toys, which were made between April 19 and July 6 and sold as early as May.

A total of 1.5 million toys were recalled worldwide.

Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., said a retailer's audit of some products in early July first made the company aware that it might have a problem. It said it stopped production at the facility where 83 different Fisher-Price toys were made, a contractor the company has used for 15 years, on July 6 or 7 and began conducting tests.

Mattel is unusual in the toy industry because it owns the factories that make about 50 percent of its toys. The rest are produced by subcontractors, which has become the norm for the $22 billion U.S. toy industry.

Those subcontractors are held to a series of strict rules about production, treatment of workers and other conduct -- a program that generally earns Mattel high marks in an industry that has been hit with occasional reports of shoddy conditions and unsafe products.

Jim Walter, Mattel's senior vice president of worldwide quality assurance, said subcontractors are required to get their paint from certified suppliers. But in this case, the factory -- for reasons still unknown -- broke the rules and bought its paint from an unmonitored source, Walter said.

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